Help-Bus Errors

[Michael Meissner]

In article <1990Feb10.192028.16025 at eddie.mit.edu> aryeh at eddie.mit.edu
(Aryeh M. Weiss) writes:

	...

| SIGSYS is for bad arguments to a system call, but this has never happened
| to me and I do not know how bad the argument has to be.  Illegal addresses
| passed to system calls generally get returned to the calling process with
| an error code, so I don't know how exactly to get one of those (this may be
| another throwback to the olden days of yore).

When I was at Data General, we once grep'ed the current version of
System V that we had at the time (probably V.1), and the only place
that ever generated SIGSYS was if you passed something other than 0,
1, or 2 as the whence argument to lseek.  Given that the Version 6
PDP-11 UNIX only had a 'seek' call which took 3, 4, or 5 in addition
to lseek's value, to multiply the offset by 512, it may be SIGSYS was
a portibility guide that long since has unneeded.

--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA

Catproof is an oxymoron, Childproof is nearly so